HN user
Blake Patterson has a beautiful tribute to No Man's Sky[1] done on an Amiga 1000 if anyone wants to see one in action. I really love his more recent Amiga retrospective[2] and he has a great Amiga 1000 photo album[3] too.
[1] https://bytecellar.com/2018/03/14/a-planetary-anachronism-no...
[2] https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...
[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7215762159627...
I use it because I used them throughout the 90s and just find them really nice machines to use for a lot of things. Almost everything's offline first, but it's functional enough to get things done. Some things are more fiddly, but that's to be expected.
Most of what I do is creative, a mix of Art, music, programming, writing. I've done things like covid data analysis, I've written the odd letter on there, some of my newsletter gets written on there. I also use it for things like Usenet, IRC, Telegram etc. There's also a lot of really good games for it. I've heard classic 68k Mac owners have similar experiences. Of course, some say the Amiga is also the fastest classic Mac[1].
It doesn't matter what you do, if it experiences some success, no matter how fleeting someone somewhere will get really upset about it. I believe that part of this is connected to the inversion of small-scale private conversations into large-scale text-driven public ones without us really being fully aware of the difference.
Without the context of non-verbal communication or the closeness towards people we've never met we react differently online to offline. I think it's important not to lose sight of the idea that people can blow up online, call you every name under the sun and still be perfectly good people.
I found Innuendo Studios' Why Are You So Angry[1] and SSC's varieties of Argumentative Experience[2] really helpful in coming to terms with my own online behaviour. There's also a pg essay[3] that's fairly relevant. I particularly enjoyed Rationality.org's double-cruxing approach[4].
Right now I'm focusing on avoiding continuing discussions at the point they stop adding overall. Nobody's perfect but it's definitely keeping my internal Angry Jack at bay.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y8XgGhXkTQ&list=PLJA_jUddXv...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumenta...
[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
[4] https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-cr...
I'm sure you can imagine how I received that
Yeah I can see that now. Thanks. I guess once you process the first bit that way the rest drops off.
By the no nazis bit not meaning anything what I meant there was that with everything else it can be hard to tell what's intentional on the site and what isn't.
I honestly don't care who calls you guys nazis or not. Even if I wanted to (which I don't, I gain nothing by doing so) I wouldn't need to. There are plenty of people doing that already. The harder thing to do is to try to understand without pre-judging. Thanks for clearing a lot of this up.
EDIT: I noticed this in another subthread:
I do think the image should be provided with context.
I'm editing here because I don't want to add to the pile-on in the other thread. You mentioned this above:
Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil
If you want to keep the picture, what would your thoughts be on a log of that condemnation linked from somewhere in the FQA? Not necessarily Appendix L. No skin off my nose either way but I thought I'd mention it in case nobody had thought of it.
There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.
Sure, I can see that and thanks for raising that. It wasn't intended that way but I can see how it came across. Some mediums are just poor for discussion and text is always poor for expressing context.
The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
I got that sense from you at the time. I get that you've all been attacked heavily at different points. I don't think there's any way you couldn't have felt that vibe. I've seen people call you guys out to me since on a scale that I've not seen elsewhere.
The bit I didn't know is the how you operate in general. As an outsider that's just not info I have.
I genuinely had links and samples for Appendix L's C section - if you look at the post you'll see the drawing screenshot and references to building blocks. Not knowing how you guys worked, I perhaps wrongly assumed that this might've been welcome, but wasn't comfortable putting it in with that image there. I genuinely wasn't trying to gotcha you.
then the author started demanding names of responsible parties
Kurt, so good to see you again! As I said in: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510076754785649
Was it Uriel that committed that section? I could kind of understand not wanting to remove it if it was. If that's the case then context in the FQA might be helpful for people who stumble across it.
That's hardly demanding names, unless you're referring to somewhere else in the convo. In that case please feel free to point it out.
TempleOS had some features that other OS's could use, too—its use of hyperlinking is actually really cool.
If you want to see what doldoc and plumbing in one system might look like, check out Oberon[1].
Not really. I'm not sure where I got it from but I have several Netsurf versions on my Amiga, including a crash-prone 3.10 build. The last official release is 3.6 I think.
Even so the 3.10 build I have isn't built against current AmiSSL so TLS sites fail. It is slower than say, Voyager Browser and much slower than IBrowse. Netsurf 3.6 is usable if you're patient on an 060/50. Performance is around what I'd expect from a Pentium 75-100 maybe?
I regularly use the Web most days on an Amiga 4000, built in 1992. It's not perfect for everything, but I can use things like search engines, visit web sites over HTTPS etc. I mostly visit Amiga-specific sites that tend to have lower overheads. I've also visited sites like like Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. in the past.
It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.
This really isn't a good space for most of the people here on HN. SSB is very much a work in progress. When I first started trying to use the Patchwork client, lots of SSB Pubs were down. It took 3 days to get to a point where I could see people.
While censorship isn't directly possible, it's not really in the kind of state suitable for lots of people currently departing existing social networks and looking for something new.
I'm not saying there isn't potential. Even for the average HN user it's possibly ready to try but not yet ready for mainstream use.
I wonder if you could build a working IBM PC clone today.
Yes you can! There's the NuXT[1] which is a full system, or you could use PC-104 designs to build something approximating an IBM PC-type system from a later generation.
I have an X220 from 2011
Sounds like you're in good company. The author recently upgraded from a 2015 Mac to a heavily modded X230[1].
[1] https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/everything-but-the-kitchen...
Funny you mention this. Disney is stealing the work of others and refusing to pay them royalties anyway:
https://www.denofgeek.com/books/disney-refuses-to-pay-royalt...
Like say, a hidden computer running inside the system that you can't deactivate and have no access to? That kind of a hardware trojan?
I try to aim for 4-6 hours of real work a day but a lot depends on what you call work. If you mean stuff I get paid for, my workload is variable. If you mean doing productive stuff, I probably do around 8-12 hours a day.
I do a lot of writing, which means a lot of reading. Some of that writing I publish, a lot is not.
I develop my skills, not always in ways that are directly related to tasks I do for money, but they generally end up contributing to my income.
I also don't really have a weekend. If work needs doing, it gets done and I take the time when I don't have work. I worked 3 days in a row about 12 hours a day on a hardware project I'm shipping, building hardware, testing software, writing a manual, imaging cards. I'll do more of that this afternoon but I'm not working a large amount of hours today due to unrelated outages.
AirBnB as originally conceived is something that would make the world better for a lot of people.
Like Couchsurfing before AirBNB destroyed it.
Blockchain doesn't provide irrefutable evidence of anything except that the record wasn't tampered with after the fact
(and it's a very expensive and wasteful way to do so)
No it isn't. You're confusing blockchain (the algorithm) with Proof-of-Work (a method for providing decentralized consensus).
Blockchain does nothing to verify the correctness of the data it holds, only its consistency with the history.
Correct. Nor does any other data structure. Blockchain is literally just a data structure, nothing more.
There's plenty of ways of proving that these values were legitimate, but they're nothing to do with the blockchain element, that's the investigation side. What the blockchain element does is say, "X was definitely recorded by Y at T". It's a tool in the box. It's not the box.
But in this case the blockchain implementation will provide irrefutable evidence to support any investigation. It's not some magical hand-wavy substitute for investigation, but recording this in a tamper-resistent manner can be useful (although blockchains are far from the only way to do this).
From TFA:
"No other fusion power plant in the world has managed to run for more than ten seconds"
WEST[1] (Formerly Tore Supra) holds the continuous operation of a fusion reactor record time at 6 minutes 30 seconds.
It's always frustrating where teams build fantastic projects but then make false claims that are propagated across the Internet. Don't get me wrong, 20 seconds for a new reactor is good, they'll do longer. After all, the French did in 2003.
Yes it's absolutely a poor example, that's why I wrote this:
A blockchain isn't the only solution available, and it doesn't require a public blockchain.
You are right that Blockchain does nothing to ensure that the data is truthful. Neither does a centralized database.
Punk music predates thatcher and was born in NYC
Los Saicos would disagree[1] ;) Punk means different things to different people. Lets not get hung up on it.
Usually it's when you want decentralized validation of time-series data. E.g. The egg industry adopts a solution whereby the chicken are tracked on a blockchain so people know which chickens are kept outdoors and which are indoors. The eggs are then tracked and checked in at each quality gate and the consumer then gets a QR code for an app that tells them where the egg came from and where it was checked for tampering etc.
A blockchain isn't the only solution available, and it doesn't require a public blockchain. A blockchain could work in this space for storing decentralized time-series signatures.
1.5Mb Upgrades were available for regular A500s. I have one in mine. A500+ Models could have 1mb Chip, 1mb Slow. A500s upgraded to KS1.3 (like mine) could use 0.5Mb Chip, 1.5Mb slow.
It's mostly automated. They'll use tools to dump out data based on search metrics into an Airtable or Google spreadsheet, then templates for the mail stages and tools to send and track opens.
Why did they shut down?
Because Spotify had an ad-supported free service based on selling data and paying the bare minimum it could get away with to artists, while RDIO had a subscription-only service for a long time focused on music recommendations from friends. Spotify squeezed RDIO with its free tier and monetized its user data. After a fruitless trip into online radio, RDIO were bought out by Pandora.
But if there was a profitable model where they offer great customer service wouldn't they? Or at least a competitor would come in who did.
They wouldn't offer great customer service, they'll offer what they feel they can get away with. And there were competitors but they were pushed out (remember RDIO?, good times).
It's only really a problem if your software isn't designed for it. Most of the problems people had with DOS memory protection issues were due to the lack of standardization around memory management. Similarly so with Windows 3.x, running DOS programs from Windows on top of DOS was never going to work well. Even Windows95 had its problems.
On the Amiga it didn't have this problem. There was AmigaOS and that was it. The base hardware was for the most part tightly coupled to the OS and the architecture was designed to provide standardised mechanisms for accessing hardware that were fairly stable. The Amiga had different stability issues of course, but my A4000 manages fine without memory protection despite having a full MMU on-board.
Flagged because a post about a "Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster" should at least pay lip service to running Plan 9 or setting up a cluster.